Zhanga: May 23, 2007

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 (3 comments)

Everybody here knows what Linux is. It's great. The guy whose apartment I live in, he didn't know the difference between a web browser and an operating system, but he knew that Linux is the analog of Windows. Speaking of that guy, I haven't seen him since Tuesday or Wednesday night last week. I have no idea where he went for this long...

Anyways, yesterday the secretary here asked me how to resize a bunch of images at once, and I told her there's some program you can download to do it but I don't know specifics because I don't use Windows. She asked me if I use Linux. This is a secretary at an investment firm... wtf?

In other news, my connection in the apartment has been disconnected. I don't have a number I can call, so I can't find out why or how I can get it back. I guess I've been going to too many censored websites or something. So now, to get online after work, I have to sit my laptop on a windowsill. China sucks. Guess I should be glad I can steal wireless at all.

A very funny possibility was brought to my attention regarding the phone conversation in the previous post, where the guy's looking for his daughter and yelled at me. Maybe he thought I was some guy she was seeing, and got really pissed off because she's not supposed to be doing that? By the way, he called me again yesterday while I was at work, but he hung up quickly, before I could reach over and answer.

I don't really mind these random wrong-number calls. They are amusing to me, and receiving calls doesn't cost me anything. In addition, every minute they argue with me is an extra minute they're paying for.

I don't think I've said anything about my phone plan yet. Ok, so basically I went to a street corner and found some magazine seller who also sold cell phone SIM cards. Pretty much standard procedure. I paid 60 RMB for my SIM card, which came with 50 RMB talk time. The plan is mostly a prepaid plan, with a small monthly fee + additional fees for additional services.

So I pay 16 RMB/month (deducted daily) as a base fee + 1 RMB/month for domestic long distance + 1 more for international long distance. I think the international long distance fee might be 5 RMB from next month onwards, so that's 22 RMB/month ($2.86). Next, it costs me 0.13/min for local calls, 0.20/min for domestic long distance, and 0.83/min to call the US (1.7, 2.6, and 10.8 cents). Roaming is rape, something like 0.73/min, + 0.20/min or whatever it costs for the call itself. Calling cell phones on non-Shanghai networks is considered long distance (this bit sucks). Text messages are 0.10 RMB apiece, 1 RMB to send to US phones. Apparently, I also pay some sort of caller ID fee (I think that's what it says) but I never saw this on the agreement that came with the SIM card. So far in the past two weeks I've been charged 2.80 RMB, which is like 36 cents, so I'm not losing sleep over it yet. I'm not sure if it's for calling or receiving or both or neither or what.

For the past two weeks, my total usage charges not including the monthly fees has only been about 10 RMB...... if you don't include international long distance. I've spent about 100 RMB on calls to the US. Guess who the culprit here is.

Now let's compare to US prices. Cingular has a $59.99 plan for 900 minutes. I'm guessing that's closest to the number of minutes I'll use in a month. After adding all those little fees, the actual price is going to be at least $5-10 higher, so let's just say $65. That makes the price 7.2 cents/min = 0.56 RMB/min. I'm not sure where I'm going with this analysis since Cingular has free domestic long distance, unlimited mobile-to-mobile, free roaming, and free nights and weekends, so this really is getting nowhere. However, calling China on a Cingular phone costs over $3/min. I know, because they charged me with it once. Very ugly.

One thing that I should point out is the cost of text messages. Cingular charges me 15 cents each for that. Text messages here cost 1.3 cents or 13 cents for international. How stupid is that?

By the way, I really hate how much text messages cost. It's pretty much highway robbery. SMS messages are a maximum of 160 bytes, plus a little bit of extra info like who sent it and where it's going etc. Let's be generous and give it 300 bytes total. This here webpage is over 100 times that size. Maybe it should cost you $15 to read this? Wtf.

Something I've noticed here is that everyone has really cool phones. By everyone, I really mean everyone. You can be walking down the street and see someone peddling some fruit sending a text message on some super advanced looking phone. I've seen street sweepers (public janitors? I dunno) with phones 5x as nice as the one I used in the States. You'll see this really crappy, dust/grime-covered gray uniform on someone who looks like she hasn't showered for a month pull a shiny colorful phone out of her pocket. It's seriously messed up. Everybody in the US has such dinky little stupid so not-cool-looking phones in comparison. Oh yeah, and you generally don't get tied into stupid cell phone contracts because there are SIM card vendors on every street corner. (As opposed to buying the plan with the phone and having the two locked together, as is standard in the US.)

Wow. What a pointless post. I'll come up with something better for tomorrow.

4:06AM

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